College Swim Team Tryouts—Liz Snell

For more articles, videos, books, and resources about faith and art, visit RabbitRoom.com.

College Swim Team Tryouts

by Liz Snell

They’ve taken to the public pool today,
whipped up our leisure lane.
Waves slap my face; the white-haired woman
riding a foam noodle exits for the kiddie pool.
Just when the kids cleared out for school,
these bulky lads in tighty-brighties joke and jostle
at pool end, then displace volume like backhoes
excavate a high-rise basement pit.
Coach, with hands on hips, patrols the flailing,
notes some slight off-stroke for editing.
Their lane’s an assembly line that tests
jackhammers one by one. They plunge
at a whistle, at a word, face-first.
I swim like brushing spiderwebs away.
I swim like a frog just thawed in spring.
They look so easy in their hairless skins;
I balk at wobbling down the deck in front of them.

All the lanes have signs: arrows and how fast to swim.
Thin surface ropes delineate the borderless beneath.
How easy to be sure where you belong
when the water closes over you and you become
one movement bent toward one thing.
Statistics and predictions on this generation’s men
sink from sight at the deep end.
The swimmers generate their own weather here:
no currents take cross-purposes,
no wind descends without their reckoning.
Around the loop they do the butterfly, faces
all invisible: backs and shoulders
rise and fall like tectonic plates;
kicking out of water into air,
young strength lifts them
from the depths, spray crystallizes
for a fraction into wings.

---

Liz Snell lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. She studied writing at the University of Victoria and is now studying psychology. She works with adults with disabilities and in her spare time gardens, hikes, knits, and makes awful puns.

Photo by Adam Cai on Unsplash